Part-Time Policy Wonk

From Scientific American:
The first generation of World Wide Web capabilities rapidly transformed retailing and information search. More recent attributes such as blogging, tagging and social networking, dubbed Web 2.0, have just as quickly expanded people’s ability not just to consume online information but to publish it, edit it and collaborate about it—forcing such old-line institutions [...]

From North Carolina State University Libraries News:
Members of the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) have announced that they are joining the Open Content Alliance (OCA) and other major research libraries in contributing to the freely accessible digital library hosted by the OCA. TRLN is a collaborative organization of the research libraries at Duke University, North [...]

From ResourceShelf.com:
The ARL guide, “The NIH Public Access Policy: Guide for Research Universities,” includes the following sections:
• Policy Overview
• Institutional Responses
• Retaining Rights
• How to Deposit
• Resources
The guide focuses on the implications of the NIH policy for institutions as grantees, although some information for individual investigators is included and links to further details are provided. The guide is helpful to [...]

From Inside Higher Ed:
Harvard University’s arts and sciences faculty approved a plan on Tuesday that will post finished academic papers online free, unless scholars specifically decide to opt out of the open-access program. While other institutions have similar repositories for their faculty’s work, Harvard’s is unique for making online publication the default option.

From the New York Times:
Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.
Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship [...]

From TechCrunch:
Google is said to be preparing to launch a massive repository of science data at research.google.com.
The project, known internally as “Palimpsest” will become a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets built on the data visualization technology from Trendalyzer.
According to a Wired report, the storage will be free to all scientists, access to the [...]

From Information World Review:
Nature Publishing Group has introduced a Creative Commons licence for articles in scientific journal Nature that publish the primary sequence of an organism’s genome.
Nature already makes reports on genome sequences freely available for use by other researchers. The new licence formalises that arrangement, according to David Hoole, head of content licensing for [...]

From the Association of American Publishers:
The Association of American Publishers today criticized a controversial new NIH research publication policy that was enacted as part of the omnibus appropriations package for 2008, and reaffirmed that journal publishers who have opposed the policy will continue to pursue their concerns with Congress regarding the policy’s negative impact on [...]

From Information Today:
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS; www.aaas.org) announced it has reversed its earlier decision to pull its flagship publication, Science, from JSTOR (www.jstor.org), the scholarly electronic journals archive. Officials issued this very brief statement: “AAAS and JSTOR are pleased to announce that we have concluded an ongoing discussion and have [...]